Dinorah Figuera, the Woman Leading Venezuela's Road to Elections

Venezuela needs a competent supreme court, truly independent political parties, the freedom of its political prisoners, and the restored trust of its people for a democratic transition to successfully take place, Dinorah Figuera, the leader of the opposition delegation negotiating that transition, told Breitbart News.

Speaking in Spanish from Caracas, Figuera laid out a detailed process to rebuild all the institutions that over two decades of socialist chavismo had destroyed – all of them pivotal for the success of a free and fair election. She highlighted a lack of a functional judiciary, the long-term hijacking of political parties by the socialists, and a pervasive chilling effect that had left Venezuelans skeptical of elections in general as major priorities.

The first step, she explained, was rebuilding the Supreme Court of Justice, removing chavista loyalists and coming up with names of competent legal minds that both sides could accept. She noted that the chilling effect meant that many viable candidates were “afraid of participating in a new Supreme Court of Justice,” but the last round of meetings resulted in a list of 64 names – 32 main justices and 32 substitutes – to take on the role. Additionally, the negotiators are working on a “forum for political ad civil guarantees” also meant to rebuild trust.

“We suffered through, for example, the hijacking of political parties. They gave [the parties over to] other people alien to the parties,” she explained, “and the great expectation is that the organization of political parties return to their natural owners and that the exercise of guarantees for those people who opt for future electoral aspirations have the guarantee of a National Electoral Council who will accept them.”

The National Electoral Council (CNE), the body that oversees elections, had also become a fraud during the Maduro years, regularly rubber-stamping sham elections. This too, she asserted, shall be rebuilt.

“We have to appoint a National Electoral Council that is credible, trustworthy, transparent, that people have in that sense the guarantee that their vote will be respected,” Figuera insisted.

“We have initiated technical and plenary forums. In the forum on the National Electoral Council, we are beginning with the organization of political parties,” Figuera continued. “Since there was an unraveling of the right that political parties had to establish themselves and make proposals … people were afraid to participate politically and we are, as we say in Venezuela, picking up the pieces of broken glass.”

“People need to feel – the members of political parties, the owners of political parties – the security that they will have party institutions that are vigorous and ready for a process, but that requires, of course, the work being done today in the forums,” she noted.

Also fundamental to establish before elections is freedom for the large number of political prisoners languishing in Maduro’s tortuous prisons. According to the State Department, the post-Maduro chavistas have released over 1,000 political prisoners, though families insist that many more remain behind bars, and Figuera said her team is working to not just free them but end all persecutory legal action against them. Some of these, Figuera noted, are already part of her negotiating team, so the most acute victims of the Maduro regime alive are being represented at the talks.

Figuera had spent eight years in exile, rebuilding her life with her daughter in Spain and providing health care in facilities for the elderly, before taking on her current role. Then, suddenly, the call came from the State Department this spring, offering her a role in negotiations where she would have to sit across a table from her repressors.

She had fled in 2018 after advocating for justice in the case of Caracas Councilman Fernando Albán, who died three days after being imprisoned by Venezuela’s notorious secret police, the SEBIN. Socialist leaders claimed he had committed suicide by “jumping” off the tenth floor of the SEBIN headquarters and persecuted those, Figuera first among them, who challenged the regime’s official story.

“Since he went to the United Nations in New York [to denounce human rights abuses], he was apprehended and on the fifth day about, they tossed him off the tenth floor of the SEBIN,” Figuera recalled in her conversation with Breitbart News. “I had to be the spokeswoman for that case and I had to denounce to the country and the international media that he had been murdered.”

The threats against her and her family became overwhelming, forcing her to leave to Spain.

Her advocacy for Albán was not the reason the State Department gave her the call to lead a new round of talks shortly after the dramatic arrest of Maduro and wife Cilia Flores in a U.S. military operation on January 3. Figuera had been formally elected the president of the 2015 iteration of the Venezuelan National Assembly. The National Assembly is Venezuela’s federal lawmaking body and the 2015 election is the last one in which nearly all political parties agree the results were free and fair.

Nonetheless, Figuera said, her experience as both a victim of persecution and a member of the Venezuelan diaspora greatly informs her work.

“I feel with very high morals sitting across the from the man who stripped me of my citizenship,” she said, referring to Jorge Rodríguez.

“I am one of thousands of women who have had to leave to exile with a profession. I’m a Venezuelan doctor, I had to come to Spain to treat the elderly and be a Red Cross volunteer,” she explained. “I had to take my daughter out of university.”

The announcement that Figuera would represent Venezuelan anti-socialists in talks, sitting across from Jorge Rodríguez – the leader of the illegitimate but in practice acting National Assembly, and current dictator Delcy Rodríguez’s brother – took many Venezuela political watchers by surprise. Figuera has never been part of the conversation about who should run Venezuela when the socialist regime collapses, overshadowed in international coverage by figures such as María Corina Machado, the Trump-friendly Nobel Peace Prize winner, or Henrique Capriles Radonski, a much-mocked former opposition candidate now in Jorge Rodríguez’s National Assembly.

But Figuera brought unique advantages to the table: for one, no significant political baggage – a surgeon by trade, she belonged to the First Justice party while serving in the Assembly, one of the few opposition parties not belonging to the Socialist International. Unlike other, more prominent opposition leaders, Figuera did not lead prior, unpopular negotiations with the Maduro regime and had no record of disputes or controversies with others in the opposition sphere. Figuera also lived the suffering of exile from Venezuela in the flesh for nearly a decade, returning to that negotiating table with experiences unfortunately common to nearly 8 million of her countrymen.

These talks are different, she asserted, first and foremost because of the backing of the United States.

“But secondly and no less important is that the previous negotiations were made by the leaders of political parties, an awkward representation from the point of view of public opinion,” she said. “At this forum, we are victims of persecution, former political prisoners.”

When receiving the call to join the talks, Figuera recalled, she said, “I’m 65 years old and I what I want [from] my political career is to look my daughter in the eyes with an impeccable track record in terms of saying ‘I’m an in a transition process, I am leading a process that is different.'”

She kept that attitude in her negotiations with Jorge Rodríguez.

“Since we are both doctors, I told Jorge Rodríguez, we have a mutual challenge: we have to cure Venezuela. Let’s rise to what the country demands,” she told Breitbart News. “And people ask me how do you feel [having to talk to] that man … and I tell them that, well, the superior interest of the country come first.”

“That I could be here, and my partners, at this moment, as a decisive figure, and we can tell the next generations that there was a successful transition experience that gave them back democracy,” she concluded. “To me, as a politician, it seems like an extraordinary opportunity. That doesn’t happen every day.”

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